Here is another gem from my ever growing collection of slightly leftfield campaign posters. While the world is debating Syria, the local CDU chapter and their supporters take a walk to discover local Nutzkräuter (really useful herbs) and Wildkräuter (wild herbs, which must be potentially useful too?). The long-suffering candidate will tag along. Seriously. I bet all this weed is going to tilt the electoral balance.

As an aside, note that all local CDU poster refer to “our” (unser) candidate, presumably because nobody ’round here knows the poor man.

everyThe Free Dictionary: Constituting each and all members of a group without exception. →

If 600+ scientists follow current government advice, they should drink about 3000 litres of water over a five day period. Accordingly, roughly that amount was delivered yesterday by our partner Viva con Agua, leaving me slightly worried about the structural integrity of the floor, which is more attuned to support mildly obese academics. It’s really not easy being green.

Other deliveries include 300 metres of power cord and several and hundreds of kilos of books. While I always knew that running this show involves a lot of stuff, actually seeing all of it squeezed into one room is disconcerting and strangely exhilarating at the same time.

After a final briefing session for the many student helpers we have hired, we are as ready as we will ever be. In a little role playing exercise, I tried to simulate the behaviour of the average academic sociopath. While I quite enjoyed that part, I’m hoping that they will still turn up for work on Monday, and that you will treat them a little kinder than I did today (should not be too difficult).

In other news, we found a gallery of rather good panoramic pictures of Mainz on the local newspaper’s site. My favourite is the one of the weather vane on the cathedral. The fact that no one could be bothered to put the camera above the scaffolding adds a touch of charming amateurism.

I know that blogging is a wee bit monothematic at the moment, and frankly, I could not care less. So here are some pictures of Jasmin’s lair, which by now contains roughly 700 conference bags (to be stuffed from tomorrow), several dozen books, lots of other paperwork, the ECPR flag and a small British tea kettle, complete with UK plug and a set of adaptors. The latter items arrived today in that Dalek-like black box in the middle. Seriously.

In other news, it was a beautiful bright and sunny day in Mainz (more webcams here). We hope the weather stays this fine. If not, there is always that workshop on climate change 2.0.

It is mildly embarrassing to come across a great resource that is hosted within one’s own institution by accident (read: google). Unwittingly googling one’s own publications is definitively worse, but that is not the point. Nonetheless, I was happy to stumble upon the Institute of European History’s digital map server when I needed to illustrate my point about territorial cleavages in Germany. The site has a slightly dusty look and uses gifs for previews, but the licence is more than generous and the coverage and quality are impressive. If you ever need a map of Hessen-Kassel’s administrative structures in 1821, look no further. The only thing that is missing (as far as I can tell) are shapefiles, but if you are serious about GIS applications, you can convert/georeference the postscript files. For lecture slides, the gifs should suffice anyway.